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On Gary Snyder's This Present Moment

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On Gary Snyder's This Present Moment ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews ISSN: 0895-769X (Print) 1940-3364 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vanq20 Both Sides Now: On Gary Snyder’s This Present Moment Mark Gonnerman To cite this article: Mark Gonnerman (2017) Both Sides Now: On Gary Snyder’s This Present Moment, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 30:2, 88-92, DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2016.1277128 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2016.1277128 Published online: 15 Mar 2017. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vanq20 Download by: [Mark Gonnerman] Date: 20 March 2017, At: 09:02 ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 2017, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 88–92 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2016.1277128 Both Sides Now: On Gary Snyder’s This Present Moment Mark Gonnerman William James Center for Consciousness Studies, Palo Alto, California, USA To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom. … Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” (1844) In This Present Moment: New Poems (hereafter cited as TPM), Gary Snyder circles back to and corrals many of the basic themes that have defined his long life as an artivist (activist artist): the Wild, reinhabitation, work, play, myth, ritual, poetics, epistemology, ethics, impermanence, con- noisseurship, and the endless work of cultural transmission and translation. Glacial Erratic, the Tom Killion woodblock print reproduced on the cover, picks up another major theme: the interplay of mountains and rivers through attention to rock and snow. This collection of mostly wintry poems concludes on the back cover with a black-and-white photograph of the author framed by cherry blossoms at Kitkitdizze, Snyder’s homestead in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California, where he has been an inhabitant since 1969. The reader’s transition from winter to spring and back is a subtle reminder of the ever-changing ways in which circumstance shapes moment. To peruse this slim, elegant volume of sixty-six numbered pages is to remember another dimension: Snyder’s lifelong commitment to simplicity (voluntary, mostly) in his life and art. In recommending that we “front only the essential facts” as a way into more noble lives, Thoreau’s Walden brought into American philosophical literature an experiment in the cultivation of those virtues that are the fruit of monastic practices worldwide (90). As is well known, Snyder began in 1955 to conduct a similar experiment in Kyoto while a scholar and lay Buddhist monk. This was arranged with help from Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the mother-in-law of Alan Watts, who established a research library at Ryosen-an, a subtemple at Daitoku-ji (Stirling). Here the young poet translated Zen texts while seated among scholars such as Philip Yampolsky, Yokoi (later Yanagida) Seizan, and Burton Watson. At the same time, Snyder entered into kōan practice with his teacher, Oda Sessō Rōshi, and lived a householder life with poet Joanne Kyger, whom he married in 1960 upon her arrival in Japan (she returned stateside upon their separation in 1964). This tripartite training in translation, domestic economy, and monastic self-cultivation was as important to Snyder’s personal development as was his “planetary normal” childhood on ancient Pacific Northwest forest floors.1 With this in body and mind, he became an exemplar of the Thoreauvian virtue of living lightly on planet earth. By the time Duane Elgin published Voluntary Simplicity in 1981, Snyder had already, for more than a decade, enjoyed a spartan backcountry existence “on the western edge of Turtle Island /in Shasta Nation” (TPM 36) with his wife, Masa Uehara, and young sons Gen and Kai.2 Just downhill from his hand-built home is Ring of Bone Zendo, the practice place of a rural American Buddhist community founded in 1974. This sangha and its way of life, celebrated especially in the “Locals” section of This Present Moment (part II), are sustained by the kind of self-reliance, neighborliness, and parsimony that typically define rural American life: “Which means /we must think with the help of the whole /neighborhood, bullshit detectors in place but /cleanly and clearly forgiving” (TPM 26). As Elgin makes clear at the start of his discussion, a life that is “Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich” CONTACT Mark Gonnerman [email protected] William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1069 East Meadow Circle, Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA. © 2017 Taylor & Francis ANQ: A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SHORT ARTICLES, NOTES, AND REVIEWS 89 (his subtitle) is not a call to poverty but an invitation to discern and possess what is most needful. As the saying goes, “You have succeeded in life when all you want is only what you really need.” Here and throughout Snyder’s corpus, one finds respect for a kind of folk wisdom shared by peoples attuned to the rhythms of a more-than-human world as in, for example, “Inupiaq values” (TPM 55). Those of us immersed (involuntarily, mostly) in an aberrant postmodern technocratic scheme that often obscures the planetary normal cannot help but notice that the knowledge and skill Snyder conveys through his craft is a consequence of the deliberate effort applauded by T. S. Eliot when he observes that we moderns live in a time when “[t]radition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor” (49). Snyder has worked diligently to understand, remain true to, and express “the old ways” he values (Snyder, The Old Ways). Thus This Present Moment is in large part a monument to Snyder’s lifelong effort to recognize and realize the essential facts that typically shape our species even in “the Homo sapiens year 50,000” (TPM 36; see also Snyder, “Entering”). Perhaps most consequential is our awareness of imperma- nence, including the permanent mark of impermanence that is our death (see Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski). Reminders of this basic fact are distributed throughout this collection. This, for example, is from “Anger, Cattle, and Achilles” near the end of part I (“Outriders”): “I met the other lately in the far back of a bar, /musicians playing near the window and he /sweetly told me ‘listen to that music. / / /The self we hold so dear will soon be gone’” (TPM 11). Or consider “Michael de Tombe at the edge of the Canyon the Killigrew Place” in part II (“Locals”): “Mad Michael a genius, a leader, a visionary English-Dutch- /Turtle Island Elder /here in this room where he lay with his cancer, /his friends and his mala, /calming them, easing them, utterly sane / / /Utterly sane, and then slipped away” (TPM 23). Or see “Otzi Crosses Over” in part III (“Ancestors”), a speculative prose poem that deduces the fate of a Copper Age Iceman who met his death some 4,000 years ago on the Alpine border between present-day Austria and Italy, where a number of good hours enjoyed by Snyder are shared in “Seven Brief Poems from Italia” (TPM 56–59). “ ” These intimations of mortality lead up to Go Now, the title of part IV and the first of two poetic statements contained therein. The first begins with italicized urgency: “You don’t want to read this, / reader, /be warned, turn back /from the darkness, /go now” (TPM 63). In eleven irregular verses, the poet proceeds to parse with penetrating precision the end-of-life care, death, and cremation of Carole Lynn Koda, his lover, muse, traveling companion, birding partner (see “How to Know Birds” [TPM 25]; “Morning Songs, Goose Lake” [TPM 31]; and “From the Sky” [TPM 37]), and wife of fifteen years, who died at Kitkitdizze at the end of June 2006 after a long and painful bout with stomach cancer.3 Opposite the final black-ink-on-white-paper verse of “Go Now,” the reader finds a black page with white ink that says: “This present moment /that lives on / / /to become / / / long ago” (TPM n.p.).4 White alphabetic cracks in inky darkness serve as a visual reminder of various contrasts and oppositions at play in many of the thirty-nine poems that lead up to this moment: wild and domestic, pleasures and pains, Tuscany and California, the Sabbath, democratic ideals and slavery, original and derivative, the raw and the cooked, then and now. In poems that play with the yin and yang of existence, Snyder deftly draws on the various linguistic, literary, and anthropological studies that inform so much of what he writes. And this always with an eye toward showing how such learning illuminates the Dharma studies always at the base of his perceptions. Take, for example, “Here,” the poem at the end of part II, where a man observes the night sky and notes, “It’s been years since I thought, / / /Why are we here?” (TPM 38). Indeed! The important matter is simply that we are here, now, and know with ever greater clarity the karma inherent in our cultures of mass consumption that Snyder and other historical and scientifically literate thinkers have warned us about. In so many ways, the poet’s work is an antidote to an age that commenced when the United States committed a deep violation of the code of civilization with bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “What got to me about the Bomb was too much power.
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